Sarah had spent six months in meetings.
A recruitment agency director from Birmingham, she had been to her accountant. She had been to her bank. She had sat through two consultations with an Insolvency Practitioner her accountant had recommended. By the end of the autumn, she had spoken to more professionals about her company’s financial position than she had spoken to family members in a year. And in all of it — in every meeting, every phone call, every carefully worded letter — she had not, at any point, felt that anybody in the room was on her side.
Then a friend gave her a copy of RIGGED: The Directors’ Survival Manual.
“I felt like everyone was against me — my accountant, HMRC, the Insolvency Practitioner,” she says. “Reading RIGGED was the first time I felt like someone was actually on my side.”
It is the phrase that comes up, in one form or another, more than any other in the messages that have been arriving at Insolvency World since the book began circulating. Not “this was useful.” Not “this was informative.” But, repeatedly, something closer to: I did not know there was anybody on my side until I read this.
A Loneliness Nobody Discusses
The British insolvency industry generates billions of pounds in fees every year. It employs thousands of qualified professionals. It is governed by regulators, supported by legislation, and embedded in the day-to-day operations of every accountancy firm in the country. By any reasonable measure, a director in financial difficulty in the UK has more theoretical access to professional help than at almost any point in the country’s history.
And yet, on the evidence of the readers writing in about RIGGED, the experience of being that director is one of profound, almost unbearable, isolation.
“By the time most directors come to see me,” says Matt Haycox, the entrepreneur behind the book, “they’ve been carrying it alone for months. Their accountant has told them one thing. The Insolvency Practitioner has told them another. HMRC is sending letters. The bank’s relationship manager has stopped calling back. And somewhere in the middle of all of it is a person who genuinely doesn’t know who, if anybody, is telling them the truth.”
Haycox is not a solicitor. He is not an Insolvency Practitioner. He is an entrepreneur with twenty-five years in UK business, more than £250 million raised in capital across his career, and a personal collapse somewhere in the middle of that arc that, in his telling, taught him more about the industry than any qualification could have. The 200+ page book he has now written, published through his platform Insolvency World, is his attempt to give the directors he has spent the last few years talking to the one thing they kept telling him they did not have.
Somebody who was actually on their side.
The Conversation Nobody Was Having
The thing that comes up again and again in the reader feedback is not the technical content of the book, although the technical content is what often triggers the change in direction. It is the experience of being told, sometimes for the first time, that the situation they are in is not their fault, is not unique to them, and is not a sign that something is wrong with them as a person or a businessperson.
“I’d been carrying this weight alone for months,” writes David, a hospitality director from Leeds whose business had been in HMRC arrears for the better part of a year. “The book made me realise I wasn’t stupid, I wasn’t a failure — I was just in a system that nobody explains to you until it’s too late.”
It is, Haycox argues, the most quietly damaging part of the way the UK handles company distress. Not the legal mechanics. Not even, necessarily, the fee structures. But the silence. The cultural insistence that financial difficulty is a personal moral failure rather than a structural feature of running a small business in an economy where insolvencies have been hovering at or near 30-year highs.
“Directors don’t tell anyone,” he says. “They don’t tell their wife. They don’t tell their business partner. They get up every morning and pretend everything’s fine. And then they walk into a meeting with somebody who’s been doing this for thirty years, and they’re already so beaten down by the loneliness of it that they sign whatever’s in front of them. The book is partly about information. But honestly? It’s partly about telling people they’re not alone.”
When Advice Stops Sounding Like Advice
The other strand running through the reader messages is something more uncomfortable. It is the slow realisation that, in many cases, the professional advice these directors were receiving was not, on closer inspection, advice at all. It was the front end of a referral chain.
Emma, a small retail business owner in Glasgow, had been told by her accountant for nearly a year that liquidation was the only realistic option. Her accountant had a relationship with a specific Insolvency Practitioner. The conversations were always polite, always sympathetic, always framed in the language of “there’s nothing else we can do.”
“My accountant told me liquidation was my only option,” she says. “This book showed me five other routes I didn’t even know existed. I’m now in a CVA and the company is still trading.”
She is not the only one. A manufacturing director in the Midlands had already signed the engagement paperwork with an Insolvency Practitioner when somebody handed him the book.
“I was about to sign everything over,” he says. “Then I read Chapter 3 and realised he was earning more from liquidating my company than saving it. I got a second opinion and saved my business.”
Haycox is careful, in person and in the book itself, not to characterise the entire industry as villainous. There are, he readily acknowledges, good Insolvency Practitioners. There are accountants who navigate the referral economy honourably. But the system, as a system, produces predictable outcomes, and those outcomes are predictable for reasons that have very little to do with what is in the director’s best interest.
“I’m not anti-Insolvency Practitioner,” he says. “I’m anti-bullshit. The problem isn’t the individuals. It’s that the default outcome benefits the adviser more than the advised, and nobody in the system is going to fix it for you because nobody in the system is paid to.”
The Things Directors Did Not Know
A substantial portion of RIGGED is devoted to personal liability — the area where, on the evidence of reader feedback, directors are most consistently left in the dark by the people advising them.
Directors’ loan accounts that transform, almost overnight, from book entries into enforceable personal debts the moment a company enters formal insolvency. Personal guarantees signed years earlier, sometimes for facilities long since refinanced, that surface at exactly the moment the director is least equipped to deal with them. Wrongful trading exposure that crystallises at a moment that is rarely as obvious in real time as it is in hindsight.
“The chapter on personal liability changed everything for me,” writes Michael, an IT services director from Bristol. “I didn’t even know my directors’ loan account could become a personal debt. Nobody told me.”
It is, Haycox says, the conversation that the system relies on not happening until it is too late for it to matter.
“By the time most directors find out what a personal guarantee actually means,” he says, “the bank has already called it in. By the time they understand their directors’ loan account, the Insolvency Practitioner is already asking for the money back. That’s not because the system failed. That’s because the system worked.”
Hope, of a Kind
Whether RIGGED ultimately changes anything structural about the British insolvency industry is, as Haycox is the first to admit, a question for a longer timeframe than this one. The industry is large. The incentives are entrenched. The regulatory machinery moves at its own pace.
But for the individual directors picking up the book at kitchen tables across the country, the change is more immediate. It is not, in most cases, a change in their financial position. That comes later, or sometimes not at all. It is a change in their understanding of the position they are in. A change in their sense of whether they are alone in it. A change in their conviction that somebody, somewhere, is not benefiting from their silence.
“I read the whole thing in one night,” writes James, a construction director from Manchester. “It told me more about my situation than six months of conversations with my accountant.”
He is not the first reader to say so. He is unlikely to be the last.
For an industry that has spent decades quietly relying on directors not knowing what questions to ask, that may be the most consequential shift of all. Not the polemic. Not the provocations. Just the slow, almost private experience of a director — somewhere in Birmingham, somewhere in Bristol, somewhere in Glasgow — closing the book at two in the morning and understanding, for the first time in months, that they were never as alone as the system had led them to believe.
